Carving up 'spam'

Arkansas Business, Jan 20, 2003 by Dennis Simpson

SPAM: A TECH TERM THAT makes everyone with an e-mail account grumble. Gone are the days when we thought of it as a canned meat product; now it is an hourly nuisance using a 24-hour workday. It attacks the new e-mail account that you know you have only told to your mother. Within weeks you'll have dozens of offers for home loan refinancing, herbal Viagra substitutes, preapproved credit cards, Multi Level Marketing "opportunities," home refinancing, body-part "enhancements" -- plus the ubiquitous photos so sexually explicit that they would make Larry Flynt blush.

So how did we get here? It's simple: Follow the money. In many ways, spam is similar to the telemarketing industry -- a mostly unwanted nuisance that we have learned to tolerate without the use of firearms. The "cost per hit" is so low that it begs to be used as a scatter-shot approach. I recently received an offer from a company to spam 27.5 million addresses with my e-mail sales message for $129. It also promised a 400 percent increase in business, or my $129 would be refunded.

Much like telemarketing, the reject rate is high and the annoyance factor is even higher, but no one is rioting in the streets. So, it continues. I will note that telemarketers will have their day in the upcoming Congress and have offered to fund a $12 million, nationwide "do not call" list that will be free to join. They will offer to pass along Caller ID information that will show the name and originating number of the telemarketer. They have agreed to pay monetary compensation (after 2006) to anyone who is on the list that was called in error. I can only imagine the backroom negations that produced this agreement, and it will likely be the model for spam in the next five to eight years if there is enough public outcry to force legislation.

Who are spammers? They typically fall into two groups: Well-organized, big-time players that deal as fulfillment houses to serious advertisers and "mom-and-pop" advertisers. Both use the same techniques, and therein lies the problem -- and the solution.

Spammers simply abuse the basic nature of e-mail: quick, efficient, straightforward communication. E-mail was designed as a tool to be used in military, educational and government organizations. No thought was given to an e-mailer posing as someone else. Why would they? All of the initial users of email would want to be known as themselves. Spammers abuse that fact by posing as a nonexistent user usually with a computer-generated address to thwart attempts to reply to or block the address.

E-mail contains three addresses: the address to be spammed, the reply address of the sender (usually faked or hidden) and the actual address of origination (typically so masked that only someone with no love life and Coke-bottle glasses can find it).

How can we stop it? This answer is simple and easy, and it wouldn't require federal legislation. An organization called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers formulates and enforces policies for the Internet. Much as a computer must obey the rules of its operating system, all Internet service providers must obey the rules of ICANN. ICANN has the authority to force ISP providers to validate the return/reply address of the sender. This would in effect turn on the Caller ID function for e-mail. All addresses that appeared on your e-mail would actually be from the sender, and the deeds of abusers would be seen and could be blocked. Spain blockers could be effective. No legislation involved.

In short, if ICANN had the will to, it could issue a single change in the software policies of the Internet, and tomorrow morning a vast serving of spam would disappear. As soon as spammers' reply addresses were seen in the light of day, if professionals would block them completely and the jig would be up. Legitimate e-mail would prosper without being blocked by well-meaning spam software that sometimes misunderstands a mailing's format.

Dennis Simpson is owner of Computing Solutions Inc. in Little Rock.